Categoria: English

The need to rescue socio-ecological sensibility

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

From August 19 to 23, the XIX International Congress of C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology, in which I participated, was celebrated in Copenhagen, Denmark. There were nearly 700 Jungians, from all parts of the world, even Siberia, China and Korea. The great majority were experienced analysts, many of them authors of books relevant to this field.  The predominate tone was: the need for psychology in general, and Jungian analytical psychology in particular, to open up to social and ecological communitarianism.

This concern arises from C. G. Jung’s thinking itself.  To him, psychology did not draw boundaries between the cosmos and life, biology and spirit, body and mind, conscious and unconscious, or between the individual and the collective. Psychology dealt with life in its totality, in its rational and irrational dimensions, symbolic and virtual, individual and social, terrestrial and cosmic and in its somber and luminous aspects. That is why he was interested in everything: the esoteric phenomena, alchemy, parapsychology, spiritualism, flying saucers, philosophy, theology, Western and Oriental mysticisms, the original peoples, and the more advanced scientific theories. He knew how to incorporate all these fields of knowledge, discovering hidden connections that revealed surprising dimensions of reality. He knew how to draw lessons and hypotheses from everything, and to open possible windows on reality. Therefore, he did not fit into any discipline, which is why many ridiculed him.

We need to incorporate this holistic and systemic vision into our understanding of reality. Otherwise, we will continue to be hostage to fragmentary visions, missing the broader horizon. In this effort, Jung is a privileged interlocutor, particularly in rescuing sensible reason.

His was the merit of having valued and attempted to decipher the messages hidden in the myths. They are the language of the collective unconscious, which has relative autonomy. It possesses us more than we possess it. Each one has more thoughts than what he himself thinks. The organ that captures the meaning of myths, of symbols and of the great dreams, is the sensible or cordial reason. It is viewed with suspicion in modern times, because it could obscure the objectivity of thought. Jung was always critical of the excessive use of instrumental-analytical reason, because it closed off many windows to the soul.

The 1924-25 dialogue between Jung and an Indigenous of the New Mexico Pueblo nation is well known. This Pueblo man thought that Whites were crazy. Jung asked him why Whites were crazy. The Pueblo replied: “They say they think with the head”. “Of course they think with the head”, Jung replied, “how do you think?” Jung asked. The surprised Pueblo native answered: “We think here,”  and pointed to the heart. (Memórias, Sonhos, Reflexões, p. 233).

This dialogue transformed Jung’s thinking. He realized that Europeans had conquered the world with the head, but had lost the capacity to think and feel with the heart, and to live through the soul.

Logically, it is not about abdicating reason –which could be a loss for us all– but of rejecting its restrictive capacity for understanding. It is important to consider the sensible and the cordial as central elements of knowledge. They allow us to capture the values and meanings found in the profundity of common sense. It always incorporates the mind, and is thus impregnated with sensibility and not just intellect.

In his Memorias he says: “there are so many things that fill me: plants, animals, clouds, the day, the night, and the eternal, present in human beings. The more I feel uncertain about myself, the more the feeling of my kinship with all grows within me” ( 361).

The drama of the present day human being is of having lost the capacity to experience a feeling of belonging, something that religions have always guaranteed. The opposite of religion is not atheism or the denial of the divine.  The opposite of religion is the inability to bond and re-bond with all things. People now are uprooted, disconnected from the Earth and from the soul, which is the expression of sensibility and spirituality.

For Jung the great problem now is of a psychological nature: not of psychology understood as a discipline or only as a dimension of the psyche, but of psychology in the integrating sense, as the totality of life and the universe as perceived by and represented in the human being. In this sense, Jung writes: “It is my most profound conviction that, starting now and for  he indefinite future, the true problem will be of a psychological nature. The soul is the father and mother of all unresolved difficulties that we launch in the direction of heaven”  (Cartas III, 243).

If we now fail to rescue sensible reason, which is an essential dimension of the soul, it will be difficult to mobilize respect for the otherness of beings, the love of Mother Earth with all her ecosystems, and to experience compassion with those who suffer in nature and in humanity.

An Enduring Challenge: corporations’ socio-environmental responsibility

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are already past the economics of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who in the September 1970 issue of Time Magazine, said: «the social responsibility of corporations consists of maximizing the earnings of the stockholders». Noam Chomsky is more of a realist: «Corporations are the closest things to totalitarian institutions». They do not have to give explanations to the public, or to society. They act as predators, and their prey consists of other corporations. To defend themselves, the people can only count on one instrument: the State. There is, however, a difference that must not be overlooked: «while General Electric, for example, need not answer to anyone, the state must give regular explanations to the people» (Le Monde Diplomatique, Brazil, nº 1, August 2007, page 6).

Corporations realized decades ago that they are part of society, and have a social responsibility, in the sense that they must cooperate if everyone is to have a better society.

It could be defined this way: Social responsibility is the obligation the corporation assumes, of seeking goals that in the mid and long range, are good for business, and also good for society as a whole.

This definition must not be confused with social obligation, that is, of meeting their legal obligations: the payment of taxes and fulfillment of their duties with respect to their workers. This simply is what the law requires. Nor is it the social answer: the capacity of an enterprise to respond to the changes wrought by a globalized economy and society, such as for example, changes in governmental economic policies, new legislation, and the transformations in consumer profiles.  The social answer is that which the enterprise must do in order to adapt and to be able to reproduce.

Social responsibility goes beyond all of this: it is what the enterprise does after having fulfilled all its legal obligations, in order to improve the society of which it is a part, and to guarantee a quality of life and of the environment. It is not just what it does for the community, which would be philanthropy, but what it does with the community, with the participation of its members in projects designed and supervised in common. This is the liberator.

However, in recent years, thanks to the ecological consciousness awakened by the imbalance of the Earth-system and the life-system, the theme of socio-environmental responsibility has arisen. The key event occurred on February 2, 2007, when the UN organ that encompasses 2,500 scientists from more than 135 countries, the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change, (IPCC), after six years of investigations, released its findings to the public. We are not headed towards global warming and profound climate changes. We already are within them. The status of the Earth has changed. The weather will change greatly.  If we do nothing, the temperature could rise by up to 4-6 degrees centigrade. This change, which is 90% certain, is anthropogenic, which means that is caused by human beings, better put, by the form of production and consumption that already has been in existence for three centuries, and which now has been globalized. The greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide and methanol, are the main causes of global warming.

The following question was posed to the corporations: to what degree will they contribute to cleaning up the planet, by introducing a new paradigm of production, consumption and recycling of waste, consistent with the rhythms of nature and the network of life, and without sacrificing the natural goods and services?

This theme is being discussed in all the great global corporations, particularly after the reports by Nicholas Stern (former principal economist of the World Bank); the former vice-president of the United States, Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth, and several conventions on global warming by the UN. If henceforth we do not invest some 450 billion dollars, per year, to stabilize the climate of the planet, by 2030-2040 it will be too late, and the Earth will enter an era of great extinctions, that in great measure will affect the human species. A recent gathering of the International Agency of Energy noted that the decisions must be made now, and not in 2020. The year 2015 is our last chance. After that it will be too late, and we will go forward to an encounter with the unspeakable.

These environmental problems are so important that they must be put before the simple question of social responsibility. If we first do not assure planet Earth, with her ecosystems, there will be no way to save society and its collection of corporations. Consequently: socio-environmental responsibility!

Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The empire’s extreme arrogance: universal spying

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The kidnapping of the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, by barring his plane from entering European air space, and the revelation of universal spying by the organs of intelligence and control of the Northamerican government, (NSA), cause us to reflect on a cultural topic of grave consequences: arrogance. The above mentioned facts show the level of arrogance reached by the Europeans, under pressure from the United States. Arrogance is a central theme of Greek reflections, whence we come. In modern times it has been extensively studied by Luigi Zoja, an Italian thinker with a background in economics, sociology and analytical psychology, whose book, Historia da Arrogância, (Axis Mundi, São Paulo, 2000) was published in Brazil.

This dense book traces the history of arrogance in world cultures, especially in Western culture. The Greek thinkers, (philosophers and dramatists) noted that rationality, as liberated from mythology, was inhabited by a demon that would lead to unbounded knowledge and desire, in an endless process. That energy tends to destroy all limits and ends up as arrogance, the true sin that the gods punished harshly. The excess in any field was called hubris, and Nemesis was the divine principle that punished arrogance.

The imperative of old Greece was meden agan: «nothing to excess».  Thucydides would have Pericles, the genial politician from Athens, say: «we love beauty but with frugality, we use wealth for active projects, without useless ostentation; poverty shames no one, but it is shameful not to do everything possible to overcome it». The Greeks looked for the just measure in everything.

Oriental ethics, Buddhist and Hindu, preach the imposition of límits on desire. The Tao Te King already said: «there is no greater disgrace than not knowing how to be content»  (cap.46); and «it would have been better to stop before the glass overflowed» (cap.9).

The hubris-excess-arrogance is the major vice of power, be it personal, of a group, or of an empire. Today that arrogance is embodied in the Northamerican empire, that subjugates all, and in the ideal of unlimited growth, that underlies our culture and political economics.

Excess-arrogance has presently reached its peak in two fronts: in unlimited vigilance, that consists of the capacity of an imperial power to control everyone, by sophisticated cybernetic technology, violating the rights of sovereignty of a country and the unalienable right to personal privacy. It is a sign of weakness and fear, that an empire can no longer convince by its arguments, or attract by its ideals. So it uses direct violence, lies, disrespecting rights and statutes internationally consecrated.  According to the great cultural historians, Toynbee and Burckhard, these are the unequivocal signs of the unrestrained decadence of empires.  But they cause unimaginable destruction as they decline.

The second front of the hubris-excess resides in the dream of unlimited growth through the merciless exploitation of natural goods and services. The West created and exported to the whole world this type of growth, measured by the quantity of material goods (GNP).  It breaks with the logic of nature, that always self regulates, maintaining the interdependence of all with all. Thus a tree does not grow endlessly to the sky, and in the same way, the human being knows its physical and psychological limits. But this development causes humans to impose their arrogant process on nature: thus consuming until they sicken, while simultaneously seeking total health and biological immortality. As the limits of the Earth are being felt, because it is a small and sick planet, humans employ new technologies to force the Earth to produce even more.  She defends herself through global warming, with its extreme events.

Soja correctly says: «growth without end is nothing more than an ingenuous metaphor for immortality» (p.11). Samuel P. Huntington, in his controversial book, Clash of Civilizations, (El choque de civilizaciones, Paidos 1998) affirmed that Western arrogance constitutes «the most dangerous force for instability and possible global conflict in a world of multiple civilizations» (p.397). The surpassing of all limits is aggravated by the lack of sensible and cordial reason. Through it, we emotionally read the data, listen to the messages of nature. and perceive the humane of human history, dramatic and hope-filled.

The acceptance of limits makes us humble and connects us to all beings. The Northamerican empire, through the very logic of dominating arrogance, distances itself from everyone, creating distrust, rather than friendship and admiration.

I end with a story by Leo Tolstoi, in the style of João Cabral de Mello Neto: How much land does a man need? A man made a pact with the devil: he would receive all the land he could walk on foot. He began to walk, day and night, without stopping, from valley to valley, from mountain to mountain, until he fell dead from exhaustion. Tolstoi comments: had he known his limits, he would have known that he only needed a few meters; he would not need more than that, to be buried.

To be admired, the United States would not need more than its own territory and its own people. They would not need to distrust everyone, or always to be prying into the lives of all the world

Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Can the Roman Curia be Reformed?

Leonardo Boff7 Comentários

The Roman Curia consists of all the organs within the 44 hectares surrounding Saint Peter’s Basilica that assist the Pope in governing the Church. There are just over three thousand functionaries. It began small, in the XII century, but in 1588 it was transformed by Pope Sixtus V into a body of experts, created especially to confront the reformers; Luther, Calvin and others. Paul VI, in 1967, and Pope John Paul II, in 1998, tried in vain to reform it.
Is considered to be one of the most conservative governmental administrations in the world, and is so powerful that in practice it delayed, filed away and annulled the changes introduced by the two previous popes, and blocked the progressive line of Vatican Council II, (1962-1965).

It continues undetered, as if it worked not for the times but for eternity. However, the moral and financial scandals that took place within its confines have been of such magnitude that a cry has arisen from all the Church, requesting that the new Pope Francis undertake to reform it as one of his missions. As Giancarlo Zizola, the prince of the specialist on the Vatican, sadly now gone, wrote: «four centuries of counter-reformation have nearly extinguished the revolutionary chromosome of the original Christianity, as the Church established herself as a counterrevolutionary organism» (Quale Papa, 1977, page 278).  It rejects everything that is new. In a February 22, 1975 speech to the members of the Curia, Pope Paul VI went as far as to accuse the Roman Curia of having «an attitude of superiority and pride towards the Episcopal College and the People of God».

Will Pope Francis succeed in transforming the Curia, combining Franciscan sensibility with Jesuit rigor? He has wisely surrounded himself with eight experienced Cardinals, from every continent, to work with him to realize this colossal task, and the purges that necessarily must be realized.

Behind all this there is a historic-theological problem that greatly hinders the reform of the Curia. It is expressed by two contradictory visions. The first comes from the fact that, after the 1870 proclamation of the infallibility of the Pope, with the consequent Romanizing, (uniformization), of the whole Church, there was a maximum concentration at the top of the pyramid: namely, the papacy, with «supreme, total, immediate» power (canon 331). This means that all decisions are concentrated in him, a load that is practically impossible for a single person, even with absolute monarchical power, to carry alone. No decentralization is acceptable, because it would reduce the supreme power of the Pope. The Curia, then, surrounds the Pope, who becomes its prisoner; sometimes blocking initiatives that are contrary to its traditional conservatism, or simply putting aside projects until they are forgotten.

The other vision recognizes the weight of the monarchical papacy. It seeks to breathe life into the Synod of Bishops, a collegial organism created by Vatican Council II to assist the Pope in governing the Universal Church. But John Paul II and Benedict XVI, pressured by the Curia, who saw it as destroying the centralism of Roman power, turned it into a consultative rather than a deliberative organism. It meets every two or three years, but with no meaningful effect on the Church.

All indications are that Pope Francis, by convoking the eight Cardinals in order to reform the Curia, with him and under his leadership, will create an organism through which he will preside over the Church. Let’s hope he enlarges this collegiate organism, including representatives not only of the hierarchy but of the whole People of God, women included, because women are the majority of the Church.  Such a step does not appear impossible.

The best way to reform the Curia, in the opinion of experts on Vatican affairs and also of some important leaders, would be a major decentralization of functions. We are in the era of globalization, and of real time electronic communications. If the Catholic Church wants to adapt to this new period of humanity, nothing would be better than to undertake an organizational revolution.  Why not transfer to Africa the Secretary (dicasterio) for the Evangelization of the Peoples?  Relocate the Secretary of Inter-Religious Dialogue to Asia? That of Justice and Peace to Latin America?  Couldn’t the Secretary for the Promotion of Christian Unity be in Geneva, close to the World Council of Churches?  Some secretariats, those involved with the most immediate things, would remain in the Vatican. Through video-conferences, skype and other communication technologies, they could maintain direct daily contact. This would avoid the creation of an anti-power, at which the traditional Curia is a great expert. It would make the Catholic Church truly universal, not just Western.

As Pope Francis is always asking us to pray for him, we have to, in effect, pray deeply, so that this wish becomes reality, for the benefit of all.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.